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Space shuttle blasts off with huge Japanese lab

By NewScientist.com news service and New Scientist Space and Reuters

Space shuttle Endeavour blasts off, carrying a Japanese lab for the space station

(Image: NASA/Jim Grossmann)

The US space shuttle Endeavour blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday to deliver part of a long-awaited Japanese space laboratory and a Canadian-built robotic system to the International Space Station.

“We would like to say konnichiwa, domo arigato and banzai,” commander Dominic Gorie said shortly before liftoff – speaking Japanese in a nod to that country’s important role in the mission.

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With the arrival of Japan’s lab, all 15 partner countries in the space station venture – the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and 11 members of the European Space Agency – are represented in orbit. Europe’s first permanent space lab, Columbus, was delivered to the station last month.

Art and dance

The &dollar;100-billion space station is 60% complete after a decade of construction and must be finished by the time the three remaining US space shuttles are retired in 2010.

Endeavour was carrying the first part of the elaborate Japanese space laboratory called Kibo, meaning “hope”, which has been under development for over 20 years.

About the size of a double-decker bus, Kibo will be the station’s largest laboratory and the only one with facilities for art and “orbital dance”, along with experiment racks for biomedical studies, fluid physics research and life science.

Several of Kibo’s experiments – focusing in part on medicine, biology, biotechnology and communications – are seen as crucial steps in preparing further missions to the Moon and even human missions to Mars.

Launch failures

The main part of the laboratory is scheduled for launch in May, and the final part – an external porch for experiments in vacuum – next year. Much of its equipment and computers are inside the storage chamber riding aboard Endeavour.

After a safety inspection in orbit to check for damage during launch, Endeavour is scheduled to slip into a berthing port at the station on Wednesday.

There were a couple of problems on the way up – a cooling system and instruments monitoring three of the shuttle thruster jets failed – but LeRoy Cain, head of the mission management team, said neither would be an issue for the flight.

Delivering the first part of Kibo is only the beginning of a complicated 12-day mission at the station, which includes five spacewalks by the Endeavour crew.

Shield repair drill

Two outings are reserved for the assembly of the Canadian-built robotic system named Dextre, which adds manual dexterity and another 9 metres (30 feet) of reach to the station’s mobile crane.

Spacewalking astronauts are scheduled to test a heat-shield repair technique developed after the 2003 Columbia disaster, so that damaged shuttles have a better chance of surviving re-entry.

NASA wants to have the heat-shield repair kit completed before dispatching a shuttle to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope later this year. In case of an emergency, the Hubble mission crew won’t be able to reach the safety of the space station.

Endeavour will have company in space. The European Space Agency’s debut spacecraft – the Automated Transfer Vehicle – launched from French Guiana on Saturday and will hover near the space station during the shuttle’s visit, waiting for its turn to dock.

The Return of the Space Shuttle – Learn more in our continuously updated special report.